My Year of Meats

"Coming at us - in waves, massed and unbreachable - knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment - becomes bad knowledge - so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness.

If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance.

So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm."

Ruth Ozeki - My Year of Meats

Want to (even momentarily) step out of the box?

Encompassing a vast and steaming buffet of cultural perversion and America's attempt to impregnate a universal code of greed, gluttony, and ignorant inhumanity on unsuspecting nations My Year of Meats delivers everything from a life-altering message to characters of unending depth. The reader is seamlessly pulled along for a painfully evocative ride leaving a heavy stomach and an ironic yearning for seconds as soon as the last page has turned. Jane Takagi-Little, a half-Japanese half-American documentarian, delves blindly at first into the meat industry within the United States while filming a television show to be aired in Japan on the 'wholesomeness' of American Beef. With the show sponsored in its entirety by BEEF-EX, Jane is brought to a stranglehold decision - follow capitalist doctrine and support one's sponsor or follow her gut and veer off the assigned path with devastating consequences. This is a story of manifest destiny, the blind leading the blind, and one woman's attempt to take the small audience she has and create something engrossing.

Read it - sometimes you find a jewel that is not on the best-seller shelf. This is that jewel.